CTO Breakfast Report

As we did introductions today, a surprising number of people were
remodeling their basement (time of the year, I guess). Consequently
we ended up talking about home theaters set ups for the first part of
the meeting. Interesting tidbit: maximum run length for HDMI is 50
feet.

We talked about Facebook
Beacon for a while. There was much more discussion of social
networks in general than of Beacon for a while, but then we dove into
the meat of the power of recommendations and the vast value in
coloring the social graph with meta data--including trust data.

Kids see Myspace as being about who they are and Facebook as being
about what their friends are doing. Some people want to see what
happening in all aspects of their life on the Facebook page. That
leads to problems with
business applications on Facebook.

I'd brought Super
Crunchers
with me, intending to talk about it a little and the conversation
went that direction without me even having to bring it up. The
discussion of what companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are
doing with our data led to a discussion of methods.

In fact, it's distinctly possible that Rossmiller, alone at her
computer, has a better track record than the Justice Department. A
Washington Post analysis in 2005 of the 400-plus people charged with
terrorism-related crimes by the federal government found that only 14
of those convicted actually had any ties at all to al Qaeda or its
network. Rossmiller's cases have come with solid backup, while the
feeble evidence in the other high-profile Justice Department cases
makes many prosecutors roll their eyes. Consider the seven Miami men
arrested in the summer of 2006 and hyped as desiring to wage a
"ground war" against the US and intending to blow up the Sears Tower
in Chicago. They turned out to be a bunch of trash-talking blowhards
whose plans were formulated while smoking pot in an empty
warehouse. In contrast, the man Rossmiller most recently implicated ---
Michael Reynolds --- had prepared meticulous plans to blow up pipelines
and was shopping online for used gas trucks to implement his
plot. The Pennsylvania resident was arrested after traveling 2,000
miles to southern Idaho, lured by Rossmiller into a supposed meeting
with a financial backer.

"When I was in the White House and doing terrorism, the holy grail
was 'actionable intelligence,' and she brings a form of actionable
intelligence," says Roger Cressey, a White House counterterrorism
official in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. (He
learned of Rossmiller after he left the government.) The FBI, on the
other hand, has failed in every attempt to modernize its technology
since 2001, and it so restricts the software available to agents that
they can't even begin to match what Rossmiller does. "The FBI is a
dinosaur in many respects," says Cressey.

Rossmiller agrees. "I went to a meeting in Great Falls, and we got to
talking, and someone had to look something up online," she says. "I
asked, 'What do you use for Internet access?' and one agent said, 'We
have to go to the public library down the street.'"

She also tells a story about another agent who had to get permission
to open a Yahoo account because it violated office regs. "They
weren't allowed," she says.

We got into a discussion about social graphs and reputation in law
enforcement Scott and I have an upcoming Technometria
interview with Dan Lulich of IOvation on using reputation to
detect fraud online.